Botswana in other languages: • de: Botsuana • eo: Bocvano • es: Botswana • fr: Botswana • it: Botswana • pt: Botsuana • ro: Botswana • sv: Botswana

You are here: Home Page > Africa > Botswana > Religions in Botswana

< >

Religions in Botswana

Author: Brian Jackman

If you’ve ever written off Botswana as an unaffordable dream, think again. It isn’t all designer-chic safari lodges where you pay up to £400 a night for the luxury of air-conditioned tents the size of tithe barns. You can still enjoy the safari of a lifetime for half the price – and get closer to the real Africa.

How? Mobile camping safaris are the answer, as I’ve just discovered on a marvellous eight-night jaunt through the Moremi Game Reserve with Letaka Safaris. Letaka is the Setswana word for the tall phragmites reeds that grow around the margins of the Delta lagoons – hence the company name chosen by Brent and Grant Reed – aka the Letaka Brothers.

Now in their early 30s, the pair grew up in South Africa where they acquired a passion for birds and snakes but always dreamed of the bigger game to be found in neighbouring Botswana.

Today Botswana is their home, and with Brent or Grant as your guide Letaka Safaris are becoming a byword for seeing wild Africa the way it should be done, sleeping under canvas with a mobile camping outfit who really know the ropes.

There were six of us on safari: me and my wife, my brother and his wife, and a couple of friends we’d known for years. Together we made up the perfect numbers to fill the open Toyota Land-Cruiser that was waiting for us at Xakanaxa’s dusty airstrip.

Here we met Brent, the older Letaka Brother, who would be our guide and driver, and together we set off through the dry September woodlands to our first campsite at Bodumatau – The Place where the Lion Roars.

My wife and I are old safari hands, but the others were new to mobile camping and I saw them staring in dismay at the dome tents, dull brown and travel-stained, in which they would sleep for the next eight nights. The look on their faces said it all. Oh my God!

I could almost hear their thoughts as they ducked through the doors to inspect their tents. Each one was tall enough to stand up in, and furnished with twin beds but nothing more, leaving just enough space to stow their bags. Outside, under the awning, were a few basic necessities: canvas washbowls, khaki towels and a mirror, and behind each tent, sheltered by a canvas wall on poles, was the luxury of an en-suite loo with a plastic throne. No creeping outside with a torch and loo roll on this safari!

And slowly, one by one, I could see my safari companions relax. It was (for them) the unexpected bliss of a hot bucket shower that started it. Then the magic of drinks by the campfire kicked in, as the sparks flew up to join the stars and scops owls chirruped in the velvet darkness. And finally the lamp-lit dinner – a three-course affair with a sumptuous chicken casserole as the main dish – helped along by excellent South African wines that tasted all the better for being included in the cost.

Nobody – myself included – had reckoned on eating so well on a mobile safari. But that was because Brent had signed up Frank Nkiwane to cook for us. Frank, a big, jolly Zimbabwean, learnt his trade at an Italian restaurant in Bulawayo, and for my money he’s the finest bush chef in Botswana.

In all, we stayed at three private campsites and each one was different. Our first camp at Dumatau was set in a feverberry grove overlooking a lagoon where fish eagles cried and hippos grunted beyond the reeds. Our second camp lay in the shade of a camelthorn acacia forest not far from the Khwai River with its bateleur eagles, malachite kingfishers and breeding herds of elephants. And at Maya Pools, our last camp, dominated by a sausage tree whose crimson flowers carpeted the ground, we saw a gorgeous male leopard and were visited in broad daylight by a magnificent old lion, one of the two resident males of the Dead Tree Pride.

By the end of the trip everyone had become a mobile camping convert. They had learned that a holiday stripped of all trivia and needless trappings can be just as sweet as any five-star lodge experience; that a tent is simply a safe place in which to sleep and stow your gear while you live outside in the sun and the wind, sharing the limitless woods and floodplains of the Moremi with the lions and elephants that walked almost nightly through our camp.

About the Author:

Brian Jackman -

Above all, what my safari companions discovered were the true luxuries of mobile camping; not only the hot showers and chilled sundowners, the same-day laundry and superb meals that Frank conjured up on beds of hot wood ash, but the priceless joys of exclusive campsites, the total freedom that comes with having your own private vehicle, and in hiring one of Botswana’s most respected guides to reveal the magic of the Moremi.
http://www.aardvarksafaris.com/articles-botswana-mobile.htm
Insight Guides recently described Brian Jackman as “Britain’s foremost writer on wildlife and safaris.” After 20 years at the Sunday Times he is now a freelance writer still specialising in all things African. We are delighted that he agreed to put pen to paper for us and describe his recent trip to Botswana which Aardvark arranged.

P.S.: This website (eyewitness-travel-guide.com) provides;

World travel destinations & top ten tourist attractions interactive photo gallery.

You may want to explore later > if so you can add this website to your favorites!..

You may also be interested in...

- Top 10 tourist attractions in Botswana - Photo Gallery & Map

- Unbiased Hotel Reviews, Photos and Travel Advice